Waiting to be 'wowed'

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There was a moment early in the third period, when two quick goals had put the visitors ahead 5-3, that Roberto Luongo gloved a long, lazy shot from near centre ice, and a significant number of fans gave him the faux cheer.

You know the one. The “well, glory be, he finally stopped one” cheer.

Was it fair? Yes and no.

They pay the money, and it would turn out to be the Vancouver Canucks’ record seventh consecutive loss on home ice, and they’re not supposed to like it. They might have saved some of their sarcasm for a defence corps that is so spectacularly careless with the puck right now, there may not be a goaltender alive who could save them from themselves.

But Luongo — saviour though he has been and surely will be again — is still picking up the pieces of two lost months, and in his current state may be playing, realistically, no better than his backup Jason LaBarbera might in his place.

Like the team’s other big man, Mats Sundin, Luongo is facing a long road back, and these baby steps, for one so talented or anyone watching him, are not covering the ground anywhere near fast enough. But he has to take them.

Ken Hitchcock, the Columbus head coach whose Jackets beat Vancouver 6-5 in a shootout — a shootout in which Luongo, vulnerable to the deke even when healthy, was beaten badly by one from Jason Williams, one of whose eyes was closed by an earlier high stick, just to rub it in — has seen the Canucks goalie up-close on Teams Canada in the past.

He knows that what he saw Sunday night, what we all saw, was not to be taken without a large grain of salt.

“I don’t think you can come back from injury, from long-term injury, in less than 30 days,” Hitchcock said. “I don’t care what position you’re in, it’s going to take four weeks before you see signs of where that player is going to be at. Especially this time of year, it’s like we’re all playing 82 playoff games just to get in the playoffs — and then you have guys trying to come in … you’re going to see Brendan Shanahan go through the same thing [in New Jersey]. This is really, really difficult.”

Luongo is two games into his comeback. Sundin is six.

There are miles and miles to go, and as the team lurches to the all-star break, clinging to the next-to-last mythical playoff spot, though barely past the halfway mark, boundless patience is a big ask.

“Our guys are battling,” said Canucks head coach Alain Vigneault. “[Columbus] scored four goals in a row, our guys could have folded. They didn’t. Mats is playing better, we all know Roberto can play better, and those are key components of our team.”

“I think Sundin’s starting to come, his first three steps are quicker now, and he’s getting into holes to shoot the puck that he wasn’t two weeks ago. Mats is going to be a really dangerous player for teams to defend against,” Hitchcock said, charitably.

But not yet. The big Swede scored his second goal, and nearly his third, but the shifts are still awfully short before he’s out of gas.

And Luongo isn’t close to being the goalie of old, and knows it. Someone asked if he thought he could feel his form returning — after all, he made some fine saves, off Kristian Huselius and Nash and others — and Luongo did everything but laugh.

“I don’t think so. Not when I let in five goals [on the first 17 shots] in a game,” he said. “I tried to do my best out there, but it’s to be expected, I didn’t expect to come in and be where I left off. It’s going to be a process.

“There were a few breakdowns, but at the same time, I’ve got to bail my teammates out on some of those, and unfortunately the timing’s not quite there yet,” he said. “I’m going to work hard to get it back. I felt much better tonight. Obviously the results are not there, but as far as moving around and ... the first game was about not knowing with my groin, and tonight I didn’t have that in my mind at all.”

It was a night of mixed signals all around. And for everyone who thought the signs were encouraging, there’s someone else who left the building shuddering at the breathtaking ineptitude shown in spurts by this reeling hockey club.

“We battled hard for 65 minutes,” Luongo said. “If we play like that every night, we’ll definitely get the result in the future. This is the battle level we want every night.”

But even when they tried to do the right thing, it turned out wrong.

Luongo lost his stick, and Jannik Hansen was trying to return it to him when the man Hansen should have been covering up at the point, Mike Commodore, got the puck and rifled it past both of them, off the crossbar and in. Earlier, Luongo dived to stop Nash at the corner of the net, but half the Canuck team did the same thing, and Nash darted around behind and with his massive wingspan, easily scored on the wraparound with no one in the net.

The goalie left fans’ hearts in their throats when he appeared to fall awkwardly on a jam play at the corner of the crease, and later, when a rugby scrum broke out in front of him, he crawled out the side door to safety, but went to his knees, as if in pain.

“Just, the puck hit me a couple of times in areas where I didn’t have much padding, but it’s just bruising, nothing serious,” said Luongo.

In the end, though, it was another loss to a team that had come all the way across the country after a Friday night game to play a late Sunday afternoon tilt.

“We have to review our travel. We were really fortunate to get the two points, but we had no legs,” said Hitchcock.

“The feeling you had in the game, it was just so bizarre. There was a lot of emotion — I mean, we’ve read the papers here … and I’m sure it was very entertaining for the fans, but this is why coaches get into the scouting business, games like this.”

ccole@vancouversun.com

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